GENERAL AWESOME – Clipsal 500 Programme Pain

We WERE going to start this website off on the right foot and have a sassy introduction and tell you all the awesome content we were going to feature.

We were going to spin shit until we fell over.

It was gonna be good.

Instead we need to rant about the Clipsal 500 race. It’s just been on; it might be still top of mind. For those not in the nation, the Clipsal 500 is a round of the V8 Supercars tin-top championship.

Not quite DTM and not quite Nascar, these charlatan touring cars stemmed from a proud and lustrous history of road-race cars. Usually based on production cars, often generating homologation specials.

Shit like this

Shit that ruled. Shit that mattered. Shit your Dad drove. Shit that meant you could go to school on Monday and say how your Dad’s car shit all over your mate’s Dad’s car. Coz his car was shit. Coz it lost.

There was no mistaking one car from another, either. Traditional, hand-painted signage and striking, clear, concise sponsorship regalia. Of TV channels:

And durries:

Today’s V8 Supercars feature none of this. Their style and colour schemes have been homogenised to the point that it’s nigh impossible to tell the difference.

Sometimes the teams forget what they drive.

The body shells, while different, are just too similar in their dimensions. And underneath, they’re incredibly similar, utilizing the same Falcon-derived suspension dating back to the mid-1990s.

All this fast-paced, semi-relevant tin-top pictorial history brings me to this…. This is the programme for the 2011 Clipsal 500 V8 Supercar race:

Horn.

But where’s the fucking cars we ask?

I mean, am I being just a bit hard to get along with? Sure, I like a cheer leading grid-girl jail bait as much as the next guy. That’s why I have the Internet.

I just figured the programme of a V8 Supercars touring car race would have cars on it.

It used to:

Going right back to the old days (…of V8 Supercars)

You know why there are no cars on there? Because the 2011 crop just look so BORING.

So that’s what shit’s getting up my nose first time around. I’ve kept the Clipsal 500 programme. Time to put my feet up and take a load off.